Astronomy in Focus, Volume 1, Focus Meeting 12, E17 XXIXth IAU General Assembly, August 2015 c International Astronomical Union 2017 Piero Benvenuti, ed. doi:10.1017/S1743921317005075 Absorption and Laser Induced Fluorescence Spectroscopy of Neutral Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Argon matrices Salma Bejaoui 1,2, Farid Salama 1 and Ella Sciamma-O’Brien 1,3 1 NASA Ames Research Center, Mail Stop 245-6, Moffett Field, California 94035-1000 2 NPP, Oak Ridge Associated Universities 3 BAER Institute, Petaluma, CA email:
[email protected] Keywords. PAH, fluorescence, UV-VIS, ERE, comet. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are considered as plausible carriers for the extended red emission (ERE), a photoluminescent process associated with a wide variety of interstellar environments, as well as for broad emission band features seen in cometary spectra. We report the absorption spectra of phenanthrene, anthracene, fluoranthene, pentacene, pyrene, chrysene and triphenylene isolated at 10 K in solid argon matrices together with laser induced fluores- cence (LIF) spectra at 355 nm of matrix-isolated anthracene and fluoranthene. LIF spectra are compared with the UV/blue fluorescence spectra of the Red Rectangle Nebula (RR). The LIF spectra measured in solid Ar matrices have been shifted to the predicted position of the PAH band emission in the gas phase for comparison with the astronomical observations (Fig. 1). These preliminary results indicate that small neutral PAHs can well account for the blue fluorescence observed in the RR as it has been previously proposed (Vijh, et al. (2004)). LIF spectra of anthracene measured in Ar matrices are also compared to the emission spectra of 1P/Halley’s inner coma(Fig.